Machine-Gun Girls

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Howerter, Robert “Dob”—Founder of the Colorado Territory Ranching Association and the largest cattle baron in the Juniper.

  Hoyt, Tiberius “Tibbs”—President and CEO of the American Reproduction Knowledge Initiative.

  Jankowski, Maggie—Lead engineer on the Eterna battery project funded by General Electric.

  Johnson—A derogatory term for a male.

  Jones, Calvin “Crush”—Founder of the Old Glory Salvage and Renewal Company and the first to become what was later known as the Juniper Millionaires.

  Juniper—1,438,577 square kilometers in the middle of the United States of America comprising what once was Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and sections of surrounding states. Due to the Yellowstone Knockout and the subsequent flood basalt, electrical current does not function in this area.

  Kanton, Jack Anthony—48th President of the United States of America and the second president to hold four terms in office.

  Kutia—Female dog (from the Hindi word)

  MG21—Standard issue assault rifle in the Sino-American War.

  Male Product—The male reproductive cell

  Masterson-Wayne Act—Signed into law by President Jack Kanton in 2033, this act of Congress relegated the five states affected by the Yellowstone Knockout back to being territories.

  Meetchum, Mavis—Second largest cattle operator in the Colorado territory. Located in Sterling, she has established treaties with the Wind River people and is a strong advocate for Native American rights. She introduced buffalo back into Wyoming in the mid-2030s during a critical time for the Wind River people.

  MRE—Meal, Ready-to-Eat

  Neofiber—A variant of carbon fiber but stronger and lighter.

  New Morality—A religious movement with socio-political connections that encouraged women to remain chaste, dress appropriately, and behave in a conservative manner.

  New Morality Dress—A dress of a neutral color (usually gray, brown, or cream-colored) that covers as much of a woman’s body as possible to comply with New Morality etiquette.

  Old Growth—A synthetic coal created from wood taken from old-growth forests.

  Parson, Reverend Kip—Co-founder of the New Morality movement.

  RSD—Reality Simulator Displays; Video screens with near-perfect resolution

  Sapropel—A weak fuel used for heating and lighting in the Juniper. Chemically manufactured by using remnants of oil shale.

  Shakti—Raw female power (from the Hindi word)

  SISBI—The Security, Identity, and Special Borders Injunction (SISBI) is a set of laws enacted by a special executive order that requires all U.S. citizens to register eye-scans with the government. It also allows for border fences around the Juniper and military units to secure the perimeter of the territories.

  Skye6—Diacetylmorphinesextus (a synthetic morphine)

  Slate—Tablet computer

  Sterility Epidemic—First cases discovered in January of 2030. One in ten births are male. Of males born, 90% are sterile.

  Thelium—Theta-helium—Synthetic helium manufactured to give zeppelins greater lift.

  Thor Stunner—Eterna-powered electrical non-lethal weapon

  Viable—Non-sterile (refers to males)

  Weller, Abigail—Growing up in the family business (The Buckeye Urban Recycling and Reclamation Company), Abigail Weller chose to enter the Juniper to run salvage for Crush Jones. After the Salvage Era, she operated the third largest ranch in the Colorado territory until her death in the winter of 2058. She had three daughters: Sharlotte, Wren, and Cavatica.

  Wind River People—The general term for all Native American tribes living in the Wyoming and Montana territories.

  Yellowstone Knockout—A term used to describe China’s missile attack on the Yellowstone caldera and the subsequent flood basalt.

  Zeppelins—Four classes of airships: Jonesies, Jimmies, Johnnies, and Bobbies. All manufactured by Boeing for use in the Juniper. Jimmies are engineered for maximum speed and Johnnies for maximum cargo hold. Bobbies are a mid-size zeppelin. Lastly, Jonesies are the most customizable. Also known as dirigibles or blimps, the airships have rigid skeletons of Neofiber covered with next-generation lightweight Kevlar. The superstructure contains air cells filled with thelium.

  Zeus 2 Charge Gun—Eterna-powered electric rifle for short-range lethal combat and area-of-attack demolition.

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  Looking for more of The Juniper Wars, and need it right this minute? Check out the next book in the series, Inferno Girls. Or keep reading to take a sneak peek.

  And hell followed with her ...

  BY 2058, BOTH THE SINO-American War and the Sterility Epidemic have decimated the male population. Electricity does not function in five western states. Collectively, they are known as the Juniper. It is the most dangerous place on Earth.

  Cavatica Weller and her gunslinging sisters did the impossible: they took three thousand head of cattle across a wasteland of outlaws, blizzards, and a cloned army of super soldiers. But once again, they are on the run.

  This time, there are no outsiders, they know who the enemy is, and the stakes have never been higher. In the deserts of a broken world, they’ll be pushed to their limits.

  And standing between them and freedom is a mysterious city ruled by men.

  Magnificat

  President Jack turned his back

  And I’m Juniper bound!

  Grab a pony, sell a Sony,

  ’Cause I’m Juniper bound!

  Cottonwood fuzz—no ’lectric buzz

  We’re Juniper bound!

  Outlaw Warlords in steam-powered Fords

  Blessed, lucky, or damned, we’re all Juniper bound!

  — Country Mac Sterling

  (i)

  HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF God, I need your help ’cause what happened to us still weighs heavy on me. After all these years. How burdensome is our pain, pulled from the past, like the rocks I’d dig out of the fields on our ranch in Burlington.

  And I hefted a good portion of those stones alone. Scared. Hunted.

  Except I found new sisters, created a new family, ’cause that’s what people do.

  The memories of those days are bitter, especially our short-lived victory when we drove our cattle into the stockyards of Wendover, Nevada. I can feel the scorch, hear the gunfire, and smell the blood, see the frozen images of our battle in Wendover, a fight that changed everything forever.

  In 2058, when I was sixteen years old, my family and I had done the impossible—we’d taken our cattle from Burlington in the Colorado Territory to the Nevada border. Riding that last kilometer into town, pushing our cattle, we’d been looking forward to hotel beds, warm showers, video, and sweet electricity, which of course didn’t work in the Juniper.

  Thirty years since the Yellowstone Knockout and still no buzz. President Jack Kanton turned New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana back into territories, and the U.S. sewed flags with forty-five stars.

  The
Juniper was a lot of things to a lot of people: a goldmine for salvage monkeys who went there for scrap to sell; a new start for desperate people looking to farm and ranch, like my mama, who squatted for land; a hideaway for people on the run for innocents and criminals alike. For us, it was home. And we’d thought we’d saved our ranch when we saw the sunrise sparkling on the razor-wire-topped chain-link of the Juniper’s western border.

  It seemed safe. Pilate, our close family friend and part-time Roman Catholic priest, had run recon in Wendover—I wasn’t sure. An anxious fear inside me hissed warnings.

  The town felt too quiet. No American soldiers guarded the border.

  Something wasn’t right.

  I remember turning in my saddle and seeing the Moby Dick, a zeppelin we’d hired to help us on the drive, hovering over our thousands of Hereford cattle marching across the salt flat, their red coats bloodying the white landscape. Among the cows, our hired hands rode ponies, including the eldest of us Weller girls, my sister Sharlotte, gathering strays and pushing them into Wendover.

  My middle sister Wren, Pilate, and I rode into the stockyards. Amidst the gates, runs, and fences, a tall woman came out to meet us. A nametag proclaimed her the stockyard’s manager. She was smiling and shaking her head when we came up.

  Pilate and Wren glanced at me, letting me do the talking. “Good morning, ma’am. I’m Cavatica Weller. You prolly expected us to come later, but we made better time than we thought. Abigail Weller, my mother, she got us the good deal on the beef. You should have papers from a Sysco executive. Someone named Petersen.”

  The manager laughed out loud. “You did it! You really did it. Even without your mother.”

  I grinned. “Yeah, we really did.”

  “We’ll get you counted and paid. We’ll have to juggle some stalls, but we’ll get you in.” Then, I swear, the manager took out a slate and adjusted a Bluetooth headset in her ear.

  We were back in civilization. Back in the land of electricity.

  Pilate and I started loading our headcount into the stockyard chutes. Wren dozed on her horse since she couldn’t do much, still recovering from dying, but she wanted to be near Pilate.

  It was already so hot I’d shrugged off my coat and was sweating through my clothes. And tired, so tired. The idea of sleep teased me. But we had mountains of chores to do before I could think of collapsing into a hotel bed.

  With my boyfriend, Micaiah.

  No, not with him.

  Well, maybe.

  Micaiah had promised he’d try to be honest with me about his past, but it seemed the idea scared him. I already knew a little: he’d run off with the cure to the Sterility Epidemic from a secret research facility. And his real name was Micah Hoyt, the son of the richest man on Earth. Tiberius “Tibbs” Hoyt was the president and CEO of the American Reproduction Knowledge Initiative, otherwise known as the ARK.

  Micaiah’s father had created the army that was hunting us ’cause we knew the ARK was keeping the cure to the Sterility Epidemic a secret. The ARK had also brewed up the Gulo Delta, a serum that could genetically alter a human being to make them stronger, faster, and like Micaiah, able to heal almost any wound.

  So I knew a lot about Micaiah, but he still had secrets, and that bothered me.

  I climbed up a cattle gate and tried to find him in the sea of beefsteaks trotting toward the stockyards, where they’d feast on hay and slurp water after a long night of walking. The wet animal stench of the pens pretty much dominated my senses, but every now and again, a breeze would blow in the dry scent of the salt flats.

  My hurt ankle chirped at me, as did the shoulder where I’d been shot, but I’d decided I wasn’t going to pay any attention to the pain. I was alive. Let me hurt and be glad.

  I turned to Pilate to ask him for some aspirin when I saw a ghost.

  Must have been.

  The ghost of one of the Vixxes we’d killed—buzzed hair, square face, camo gear, standing thirty meters away by a stable and staring at me with dead eyes growing colder. ’Cause she wasn’t human.

  I wanted to yell “Pilate!” but could only manage a murmur. Inside my skull, I was screaming, Rachel Vixx! It’s Rachel Vixx! We need to run!

  The cloned super solider raised her right hand, made a fist, and a flood of Cuius Regios, the ARK’s ground troops, came out from behind cattle stalls, where they’d been hiding. Hundreds of soldiers ran at us, armed with stunners and charge guns.

  Wren watched them come. And smiled. Hours before she’d been dead. Now, thanks to the Gulo Delta, she was alive, with her Colt Terminators in her fists and a fiery mare between her legs.

  Pilate unholstered his Beijing Homewrecker: part shotgun, part grenade launcher, all bad.

  Me? I took a step back.

  “Let’s get ’em, Pilate.” Wren said it with a laugh. Even wounded, exhausted, newly resurrected, what lay before her was what she loved most in the world—a fight she couldn’t win.

  “Ladies first,” Pilate whispered.

  Wren whipped Christina Pink around and streaked toward those ARK soldiers, laughing—oh, how she was laughing—gripping her wild mount with her thighs and firing those Colt Terminators in blasts that echoed across the dead salt plains. The sunlight painted Wren and Christina Pink with fire.

  “Please, God,” I whispered.

  But God did not reply.

  For a single second, the world around me erupted into a hellish howl of gunfire, the sizzle of stunner blasts, the thunder of charge guns, the screams of horses, the cries of frightened cattle, Wren cursing, Pilate yelling out the names of the gospel writers to keep track of his ammunition—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

  Then time seemed to stop. My adrenaline hit, and an icy silence froze the world into a tableau of images—

  Wren, gripping the reins of her horse in her teeth. Both of her arms out, firing her twin Colt Terminators, the slides open, smoke pouring from the barrels, bullets blurring in the air—

  Regios, in mid-air, flung back from one of Pilate’s shells, their bodies caught in a circle of debris and blood—

  Pilate’s horse lying in the dirt, hit by a charge gun, a smoking hole in the poor animal’s side—

  Pilate standing above the horse, the action of his quadcannon snapped open, a new grenade stuck halfway into the breech—

  Rachel Vixx, blank-faced, aiming a charge gun, the blue glow of the electricity growing brighter, brighter, brighter—

  Time caught up when the charge gun’s blast struck us, sending us to our knees. All that energy wiped away my sight and my hearing.

  Outgunned, ambushed, we went down fighting, but we still went down.

  All in seconds. All in silence.

  God can be real quiet sometimes, so quiet you’d think He was never there in the first place. In the months ahead, I would learn about that silence, learn too much, and it would eat me up.

  Which is why we tell stories. To learn how to listen to the silence and not find ourselves destroyed by it.

  Chapter One

  My only wish is a bullet

  My only love is a gun

  ’Cause blood is truth

  And death don’t run

  — LeAnna Wright

  (i)

  Jailed, surrounded by concrete and steel, I stared into the round black eyes of a dozen gun barrels pointed at me, Wren, and Pilate.

  The Armalite AZ3 automatic assault rifles had self-correcting laser targeting, water-cooled barrels, and tactical readouts, including ammunition count. The ARK’s soldiers held them in steady hands. Glaring eyes, shaved heads, the Regios lined the wall across from us as they waited for orders. Wireless earbuds peeked from their left ears.

  Sweat trickled down my forehead, stinging my stitches and dribbling between my eyes to drip off my nose. My arms were handcuffed behind me, making my shoulders hurt so bad I couldn’t feel the pain in my ankle. No one ever told me adventures hurt.

  We were in a holding cell in the Wendover Police Station, south of I-
80, on the north side of the main strip. They’d turned off the air conditioning to roast us in the cinderblock cell. The tang of adrenaline stank up the place while we waited in the stifle. Dust motes floated in the sunshine streaming through the high-slitted windows. Cameras watched our every move, microphones recorded every word, but we didn’t have much to say and were too tired to move. We hadn’t slept in days.

  Wren slumped against the wall, arms crossed. Her cowgirl hat covered her bruised and blood-splattered face. Her wool poncho and leather vest puddled around her muddy boots. Her white blouse clung to her sweaty frame.

  Pilate’s hat and duster were gone. Dirt stained his black slacks and priest’s shirt. Blood rusted the plastic collar—ironic and fitting ’cause Pilate was more soldier than priest anyway.

  Pilate had helped a whole passel of women in the Juniper have babies, which seemed more important than his celibacy ’cause of the Sterility Epidemic. Only one in ten births were boys, and of males born, nine out of ten were sterile. Out in the World, women either bought Male Product from the ARK or chanced dodgy deals on Craigslist. A third option was the old-fashioned way with a viable man; that was why Pilate had his odd kind of ministry in the Juniper. Come to find out, he was my daddy too.

  He stood next to me, and his jaw muscles twitched. Every now and then, he coughed himself into a wheeze. Pilate’s lungs were still weak from our first encounter with the ARK’s army, where he’d been shot in the chest.

  We’d fought, we’d run, stole a train, all to get to Nevada. Only to be locked up.

  I should’ve known the ARK would be waiting for us. We should’ve been more careful.

  Despair hooked its claws into my belly. “Damn it all to hell.”

  Pilate cleared his throat and winced. “Don’t worry, Cavvy.”

  “I was so dumb. We all were.”

  He shrugged. “We had a good run, and if anyone is to blame, it’s me. I ran recon, and the town looked clear to me.” Then he smirked and raised his eyes to the camera. “You hid yourselves perfectly, but guess what? Your net caught the wrong fish. Where’s Micah Hoyt? That’s what you want to know!” The words sparked him into a rage. “Right, ladies? Where is Micah Hoyt? Well, we don’t know, but you won’t believe that. So, I say let the torturing begin! I’ll go first, you bunch of jackering skanks. I love the rough stuff.”